P
ERROS
R
EALENGOS
Countering stereotypes with language in contemporary
Latino immigrant literature
M.J. van Ommen (s1793284) Rijksuniversiteit Groningen MA thesis Literary & Cultural Studies
09/08/2013
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ABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction 3
2. Theory and method 8
2.1. A postcolonial approach to Latino literature 8
2.2. Towards a method: language and postcolonial narratology 15
3. Language and identity in Norte (2011) 20
3.1. Voices and stereotypes in Norte 23
3.2. Code-switching, language varieties and intertextuality 30
3.3. Conclusions 36
4. Language and identity in Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) 38
4.1. The voices of conflicted and transformative identities 41
4.2. The quest for freedom in language 48
4.3. Conclusions 52
5. Conclusions 54
6. References 57
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(…) la única manera en que me siento bien es en el eterno dinamismo de mi ser errante – que cruza las fronteras sin encontrar la atadura de la frontera (...). (Giannina Braschi, Yo-Yo Boing!)1
1.
I
NTRODUCTION
Latino immigrant literature in the U.S. is almost a century old.2 The novels of this tradition form a testimony of a 100-year struggle with social subordination in the U.S., which has not yet come to an end. Obviously, in the past century much has changed with respect to the social position of the Latino immigrant, but this particular literary tradition today still testifies of a continuing socio-cultural subordination in U.S. society. However, significant changes have recently taken place in the aesthetic elaboration of this issue in immigrant literature.
As Nicolás Kanellos (2011) demonstrates in his monograph on Latino immigrant literature, the literary tradition of Latin American immigrants in the U.S. is mainly determined by a big contrast between North and South. The typical plot written by numerous immigrant authors in the twentieth century develops more or less like this (Kanellos 2011: 3-4): a Latin American immigrant with high expectations of the ‘American Dream’ gets disillusioned when he arrives in the U.S. The homeland is associated with positive Catholic values and the Spanish language, whereas the U.S. is associated with negative values like materialism and immorality. Eventually, the immigrant returns back to his country.
This polarized view of North and South in the cultural sense reminds of the debate on Latin American cultural identity as it has been pursued in the twentieth century. In his influential essay Ariel (1900), the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó called forth the figures of Ariel and Calibán from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to define the roots of Latin American culture in opposition to the culture of North America. He pointed at European humanism as the root of Latin American culture, personalized in Ariel. His counterpart, Calibán, was the figure of North American materialism and utilitarianism. This dichotomy in the essay resonates in traditional Latino immigrant literature, which appeared for the first time shortly after the publication of Ariel.3 Throughout the twentieth century, the
1 Translation: “(…) the wanderer in me only feels good in continual motion – crossing frontiers without settling
frontiers (…)” (translated by Tess O’Dwyer, 2011).
2 As Nicolás Kanellos reports, the first immigrant novel, Lucas Guevara by Alirio Díaz Guerra, was published in
1914 (2011: 2).
3 In the Southern Cone (the southern region of South America) mainly Europeans, especially from Italy, had
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debate around Ariel and Calibán has provoked different views on Latin American identity among Latin American intellectuals. Important to note, however, is that the debate has been pursued in polarized terms. Latin Americans and Latino immigrants tended to define their culture in opposition to the culture of the U.S., something clearly manifest in traditional immigrant literature.
However, some examples of Latino literature from around the turn of the century testify of a change with respect to this polarized view of the Americas. It seems as if narratives of origin like those of Ariel and Calibán make place for narratives that attempt to unite North and South by emphasizing the change of culture and the transition of identity rather than the stability of these concepts. One indication of this changing attitude respecting culture and identity is the appearance of Eduardo González Viaña’s El Corrido de Dante (2006). This novel portrays the development of a Mexican immigrant in the U.S., who must find a place in this new country to move forward instead of remaining stuck in his nostalgic, nationalistic feelings. The story and the narrative imply a view of cultural identity as a development, a continuing transition, rather than something rooted in a nation or a remote past.
Another indication of the change respecting the dichotomic view of the Americas is the emergence of a transnational literary generation called McOndo in the 1990s. This generation, which also has representatives living in the U.S. as immigrants, is named after the anthology McOndo (1996). This anthology contained a polemic prologue criticizing exotic stereotypes of Latin American culture and literature, which according to the authors was brought into existence by the popularity of the literary mode of magical realism. The title of the anthology mocks the fictional village Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), a classic novel in the tradition of magical realism. The authors of the McOndo generation, whose dates of birth coincide approximately with the appearance of television in Latin America, promote a view on the region as influenced by globalization, affirming the mutual cultural influence of the northern and southern Americas. It seems as if this transnational movement ascribes less value to narratives of origin, because they emphasize the cultural change on the American continent and criticize a separated view of North and South.
The tendency roughly described here shows a decreased interest in the nation of origin as a central value of cultural identity. More importantly, the cultural frontier between North and South is not as emphasized as in the identity debate and the immigrant literatures I described above. This development deserves closer examination, through the study of turn-of-the-century literature of Latino immigrants in the U.S. In the context of immigration, it is especially interesting to examine the negotiation of North and South in literature, because immigrants, most obviously ‘displaced’ subjects, need to find ways to position themselves in-between cultural values (Bhabha 1994).
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conscious break-up with the past of (Latin American and) Latino texts. Thus not only the content (the view on Latin American and Latino identity) changes in the literature of this generation, but also the form. In this study I want to focus on this aspect in narrative particularly: how do language and narrative discourse relate to (cultural) identity in these types of narratives? In other words, how are language and structure employed to represent (cultural) identity, to mark a position among a variety of cultures? The relevance of these questions lies in the problematic outlined above: through the analysis of formal aspects in narratives, it becomes possible to tease out the implied relationship between North and South and observe the cultural process of Latinos in the U.S.
Latino immigrant literature is concerned with the issue of the cultural hegemony: a large group of immigrants remains unrepresented in the U.S., due to the exclusionist character of the country’s cultural policy. In Paul Allatson’s words, “the U.S.A.’s imaginability is unique because of the particular ways by which hegemonic rhetoric disclaims certain sectors as non-, un-, or even anti-American. Such sectors provide the internal loci of disavowal required for the U.S.A. to be mythologized as a community” (2002: 24). The questions about language and identity outlined above thus have to be asked with respect to this issue of the Latino minority as a voiceless community within society. What is the answer from the literary periphery to this cultural exclusion, how do subaltern voices obtain a position in society? In this study, two novels will be examined closely to give an answer to these questions: Norte (2011) by the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán and Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) by the Puerto Rican Giannina Braschi, both published in the U.S. These authors are immigrants who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s, and they are both associated with the McOndo generation. I will show that they use language and narrative form strategically to give the Latino subaltern a voice. A very important aspect of ‘giving voice’ in the novels under scrutiny is the avoidance of stereotyping and the deconstruction of stereotypes. As will become clear in the theoretical chapter of this thesis, stereotyping easily leads to ‘othering’ and exclusion of groups. In order to avoid this, Norte and Yo-Yo Boing! do not represent a coherent narrative but rather show the heterogeneity, complexity and transitory nature of cultural identity.
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of Latinos and Latin Americans. With respect to postcolonial criticism, I will elaborate on the process of stereotyping, because the resistance against stereotypes is crucial in the novels I will discuss.
My method of analysis of language in the selected novels will be based on postcolonial narratology. Admittedly, this branch in today’s broad and chaotic field of narratology has raised some controversy about its relevance and need.4 Actually, a lot of ‘new narratologies’, or different directions in narratology, have been declared and named in the past two decades, a development that seems to be based partly on the appeal of ‘newness’ in academic rhetoric. But it is also a sign that the emphasis in literary research shifts towards the study of narrative form in a cultural context. Moreover, from the perspective of postcolonial studies, the emergence of postcolonial narratology is a sign that there is a special interest for the semantic functions of the formal character of the text. Thus in order to clarify some basic assumptions, I find it useful to refer to this approach. The most important assumption is the semantic functionality of the formal aspect of the text. In the structure of the narrative and the use of language I focus on issues like hierarchy, subject/object relations and otherness, all themes that are directly related to the concept of stereotype. As Dan Shen (2005) has demonstrated, the combination of narratology and stylistics in the analysis of texts can be very insightful. This approach is especially apt for the corpus in question for this study, because of the play and experiment with form and language. It will become clear that in the context of immigration, this kind of formal experiment is not just employed for the sake of postmodern play: it is rather culturally and politically charged.
This thesis will be structured as follows: in Chapter 2, I will explain the usefulness of a postcolonial approach in Latino Studies and refute the criticism against it. A definition of the ‘postcolonial’ that allows a metaphoric interpretation is flexibly applicable in various cultural contexts. I will elaborate on the dynamic of stereotyping particularly, following the ideas of Edward Said and Stuart Hall. The process of cultural hybridization as thought over by Homi Bhabha constitutes an important background for this research. I will also explain my method of analysis in this chapter. As stated above, I depart from the assumptions made in postcolonial and other contextual narratologies. I will explain how narrative form, linguistic and stylistic elements can obtain political meaning, create hierarchies and mark categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Having discussed the relevant concepts and notions for this study, then, I will present my hypothesis at the end of Chapter 2.
In Chapters 3 and 4, I will analyze the two selected novels. All aspects explained in the theoretical part of the thesis will be examined in the texts. I will show how language, cultural representations and stereotype are emphasized as themes to show their function in cultural processes, and how language and form themselves are used to give voice to the Latino subaltern and counter stereotypes. The perro realengo or stray dog, found in Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!, is, in my opinion, a metaphor for the Latino identity that especially appeals to one’s imagination. Its ambivalence, being free to move around but outcast in society captures the identity of the Latino
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2.
T
HEORY AND METHOD
2.1. A postcolonial approach to Latino literature
To study Latino literature by means of the postcolonial approach may at first sight not appear completely adequate; it is not directly obvious how the study of the Latino cultural minority in the U.S. relates to issues of the consequences of European colonization of other continents. However, my conception of the ‘postcolonial’ is not restricted to the history of European colonization: I rather use the term paradigmatically, as a flexible model to understand cultural processes in the context of unequal cultural representation. In this chapter I shall explain that historical colonial relations are very relevant for understanding cultural processes in the U.S. First, the U.S. nation itself is politically postcolonial and imperialist, which explains the exclusionist character of the cultural landscape. Second, the postcolonial paradigm is very useful in the study of cultural dynamics in U.S. cultural minorities, because they can be considered analogous to former European colonies, as objects of a system of representation that fixes them in ahistorical stereotypes. Third, following Bhabha’s assumptions regarding postcolonial culture, the approach takes into account the agency of the subaltern. Eventually, the most important condition for working with the postcolonial paradigm in the context of U.S. Latino literatures, as in all postcolonial approaches, is not to obscure that particular cultural context. With this in mind, postcolonial criticism is a very flexible and fruitful approach. Before amplifying on the details of this argument, I will turn to an obligatory question regarding the field I am working in, namely: what does ‘Latino’ in ‘Latino literature’ refer to precisely?
This question is a delicate one. The problem about defining a group as ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’ is that it tends to obscure the variety within that group and invites stereotyping. Defining Latinos in opposition to non-Latinos is seen as a practice of ‘othering’ and ‘racialization’; it separates the group from other groups, because it supposes an essential difference (Flores 2000; Lousteau 2002). Such an effect is problematic in scholarship that aims to problematize separation and exclusion of cultural groups.5 Many scholars and artists avoid the ethnic term ‘Hispanic’ (and sometimes also ‘Latino’) which is mainly used by the U.S. government and mass media, because this term would be associated with discriminative stereotypes like unemployment, criminality or drug abuse. Juan Flores explains that this stereotype became widespread in the 1990s, when the use of the terms ‘Hispanic’ and
5 The origins of Latino Studies lie in Chicano Studies and Puerto Rican Studies, which emerged in the 1960s and
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‘Latino’ increased, accompanied by “the xenophobic tenor of mainstream politics (…), which perceives ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ most of all as a “problem” (2000: 150). Still, Flores has no objection to the academic category of ‘Latino Studies’, because of the increased transnational character of the Latino population as a result of globalization (208). Sticking to national frames in that contemporary transnational context may as well be problematic. Thus, recognizing the pitfalls of such labels as ‘Latino’, one may still use them:
With all the caveats, and fully recognizing that the very terms Latino and Hispanic are first of all imposed labels, ideological hoodwinks aimed at tightening hegemony and capturing markets, the “Latino” concept is still useful, if not indispensable, for charting out an area of contemporary intellectual inquiry and political advocacy. (Flores 2000: 209, emphasis in text) By ‘Latino literature’ in this study I refer to the literature of U.S. based Latin American authors, but I do not want to suggest that ‘Latino’ designates the immigrant population exclusively. The reason I use the term ‘Latino’ is in the first place to position my research in a particular field, where particular questions are being asked. The corpus I consider is thus not bound to the authors’ nationality but equally assumes the transnational and transcultural character of the Latino population. I will study literature of two Latin American immigrants who have different nationalities – Bolivian and Puerto Rican – but who also have a lot in common, thus I can study them both, supporting the same argument. For example, they are both associated with the transnational literary movement McOndo and the play with language and form is a salient aspect in their work. With this research project I do not intend to draw conclusions about ‘Latino culture’ in general, but I will be able to say something about a particular tendency in Latino immigrant literature.
The ideological impulse of Latino Studies which I mentioned above – the problematization of the separation and exclusion of cultural groups – signals the possible usefulness of a postcolonial approach in the criticism of Latino literature. From their start, postcolonial studies have had a similar ideological motivation: very generally put, postcolonial criticism concerns the situation of unequal cultural representation in the context of colonial and postcolonial relations. Bill Ashscroft emphasizes the ethical and political motivation of postcolonial criticism: “It is concerned with justice and liberation and it explores this concern within the various forms of cultural engagement of colonized peoples with imperial dominance in its modes and manifestations” (2012: xvi).
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point mainly originates in a different understanding about the definition of postcolonial studies and its aims. I will discuss here briefly the origins of postcolonial studies and explain how it can work in the context of cultural minorities in the U.S. and, more specifically, regarding the study of McOndo literature.
One of the founding works of postcolonial studies was Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said.6 In this work, Said explains the phenomenon of Orientalism, i.e. how the Western system of representations, including literature, objectified, stereotyped and constructed the Orient. ‘Discourse’ in this context designates a tradition in knowledge which is generally not contested (2003: 94). According to this definition, ‘knowledge’ is no more than a kind of representation; Said holds that the scholar is always influenced by culture and ideologies, and scholarship is therefore political in the broad sense of the word. He argues that in the Western history of science, the Orient and its peoples were constructed as inferior to the superior West. Central to this argument is the ‘worldliness’ of the text. This notion refers to the assumption that texts, including literature, are ‘acts’ in the world; they originate in a certain context and they can influence their context: “such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe” (94, emphasis in text). The reason that Said emphasized this dimension of the text – which may seem quite obvious now – was that in his time, the heyday of New Criticism and other text-based approaches, the literary text was only studied in terms of its intrinsic properties and meanings. Due to the major influence of linguistic structuralism, the general belief in literary studies was that the meaning of the text was to be found solely in its language and structure. Said fiercely criticized this attitude and accused literary critics of being complicit in Orientalism because they ignored the cultural and political context of the literary text.
Orientalism was an important aspect of European colonialism, because it offered a rationalization for colonial dominance over the Orient. Knowledge and representation are thus directly linked to the exercise of power: Said explained that the West was able to dominate the Orient politically precisely because the Western system of representations (including literature) constructed and objectified the Orient as ‘other’ and inferior. This is a result of the process of stereotyping in culture. Stuart Hall defines the properties of the stereotype as follows:
Stereotypes get hold of the few ‘simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized’ characteristics about a person, reduce everything about the person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them, and fix them without change or development to eternity. (…) stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes ‘difference’. (Hall 1997: 258, emphasis in text)
In the system of representations of a community, the stereotype draws a line between ‘own’ and ‘foreign’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and thus excludes and objectifies ‘others’, viewed as essentially different. This dynamic, Hall explains, generally occurs in situations of unequal power relations. So as
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Said argued, stereotypes play a big role in Western colonialism, and we can say indeed that a similar cultural process has been going on in the U.S., as I will explain below. However, Said was criticized a lot on his explanation of Orientalism and on his work in general. It was argued that Said’s contentions in Orientalism were themselves polarizing by labeling East and West as ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ without recognizing any heterogeneity or ambivalence within them (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia 2001: 74). It was also problematic for some that since Said did not include a theory of resistance, Western discourse was represented as a “one-way street from the powerful to the weak” (80). In spite of the critique, Said’s work was very influential and the main assumption he made about the worldliness of the text is still central to postcolonial studies.
The Empire Writes Back, originally published in 1989, was the first handbook for postcolonial literary theory and marked postcolonial studies as an official field of research. According to this important book, the ‘postcolonial’ is “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 2). Important in this definition is that the ‘post’ refers to the period after colonization and not only to the period after independence, as was assumed by many. The definition is traditionally centered on European colonialism, but as the writers point out in the additional chapter of the second edition, the approach can be very useful in contexts that do not directly relate to this historical context. The ‘postcolonial’ is then not so much a fixed category in literary and cultural studies, but rather a reading strategy, an approach that focuses on the cultural process in literature as affected by imperial relations. The criteria for its use are in that way quite flexible: “the validity of the post-colonial may well come down to the question of its efficacy as an historical context, an analytical tool or a theory of cultural relations” (2002: 201, emphasis in text).
Thus this reading strategy could also be implemented in the readings of literatures from contexts that could be considered analogous to the history of European imperialism. Ana María Manzanas and Jesús Benito (2003) indeed argue for its usefulness in American literatures. They follow the definition of the postcolonial that Homi Bhabha proposed in The Location of Culture (1994), which allows a metaphorical interpretation of ‘colonization’: “Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order” (1994: 171). This definition, Manzanas and Benito argue, allows critics to apply the postcolonial cultural theories “not only to the situation of groups that suffered under regimes of colonial exploitation, but also to peoples constructed as ethnic and forced to live on the fringes of metropolitan geographies and cultures” 7
(2003: 47). As explained above, minorities like the Latino population are symbolically excluded as a result of stereotyping and therefore remain invisible in the cultural landscape. So although the situation of Latino immigrants
7 In the case of the Puerto Rican minority, though, the postcolonial framework also applies literally. As many
critics indicate, Puerto Rico is practically a colony of the U.S. See e.g. Flores’s chapter ‘The Lite Colonial’ in
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differs historically and politically from the situation of former European colonies, on a social and cultural level they can be considered the same.
Another reason for the adequacy of this approach in postcolonial criticism is the theory about forms of resistance in the discourse of postcolonial texts. Said only discusses the power of colonial discourse, but Bhabha (1994) assumes that the subaltern is an agent and can also influence the discourse of the hegemony. At the base of this idea lies the principle of cultural hybridization, which refers to culture as a constant process of change. That is, culture is not a discrete ‘thing’ but it is always ambivalent as a result of contact with other cultural signifying practices. Colonial discourse is thus not a hermetic block of power, but it is also ambivalent. Therefore it leaves room for resistance or subversion of power, for example through the ‘deconstruction’ of dominant discourse.8
Thus, Bhabha’s ideas allow for the postcolonial approach to Latino literature for two reasons: first, Latino culture in the U.S. can be regarded as analogous to former colonies of Europe, and second, it assumes the possible agency of the subordinated (‘colonized’) subject or culture, so that cultural process is not considered a one-way street from the dominant to the dominated party, as Edward Said seemed to envision it.
Confusingly enough, the U.S., regarded here as the dominant party, is itself also a postcolonial nation and U.S. literatures could also be read as postcolonial. (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 2) The U.S. has in terms of postcolonial studies a paradoxical status: on the one hand it is in a historical and discursive sense paradigmatic for postcolonial cultures everywhere, but on the other hand, it is in the same aspects an imperialist nation, both to external nations and to internal ‘others’ (ibid.; Manzanas & Benito 2003: 49-51). This combination actually makes sense: Latinos, Asian-Americans and African Americans did not fit in the ‘white’ myths of American identity that were invented after independence in 1776, myths that gained a lot of ground in the American system of representations because of the nation’s need to define its own cultural identity. The postcolonial status of cultural minorities in the U.S. today is thus a consequence of that nation’s own postcoloniality which takes on the guise of imperialism, because it values its own ‘original’ myths of cultural identity so much. As a result, cultural policy in the U.S. has a very exclusionist character.
This cultural situation in the U.S. demonstrates the ambivalence and overlap of colonial relations in its context – not to mention that Latino culture could also bear traces of the earlier Spanish imperialism. It becomes clear why Said’s binary of colonizers and colonized was criticized: in practice, cultural relations and formations are ambivalent and complex, and separating groups in antagonistic camps of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ does not do justice to cultural dynamics. What is worse, by holding on to such binaries postcolonial studies would serve a purpose that opposes its ideological intentions. Jeff Karem (2001) has the same objection to the postcolonial approach in the
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Pan-American context as it has been practiced by, for example, David Saldívar and argues for a process-oriented approach:
(…) one finds that an interpenetration of subaltern and imperialist identities seems characteristic of, rather than an exception to, many American subject positions. Rather than sorting these conflicted subjects into a binary system, the pan-Americanist ought to examine the way that subjectivities and the operations of power in the Americas are often overlapping and overdetermined. (Karem, 2001: 96)
By proposing an approach to pan-American literatures that examines cultural production at the boundaries, and by recommending scholars to cross conventional disciplinary boundaries in scholarship themselves, Karem defends a view on postcolonial studies that fits the suppositions of Bhabha. Again, this type of approach fits Latino Studies very well, the more so because the ideological implications of the postcolonial approach equal those of Latino Studies. Flores objects to this approach, stating that it does not apply to the Latino socio-cultural situation because of the “systemic social subordination” (2000: 214). However, this objection is not substantial because Flores needlessly assumes that the postcolonial means post-independence. As I signaled above, the postcolonial can very well be understood as post-colonization, as in the situation of continuing social subordination of the Latino population. Flores’ doubts thus do not hold when using this definition.
To show more concretely what kind of cultural processes I am dealing with in this study, I will throw some light on the literary movement McOndo. This name, in which the name of Gabriel García Márquez’s legendary village Macondo resonates,9
was taken from the title of a 1996 story collection edited by the Chilean authors Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez. The introduction of the book, ‘Presentación del país McOndo’, reads as an ironic literary manifesto. The bottom line of the poetics of McOndo is the repudiation of the mode of folkloric magical realism in the style of Gabriel García Márquez. This refusal to use magical realism is not a purely aesthetic choice but also a political statement. Fuguet and Gómez state that magical realism after the worldwide success of García Márquez and his followers became a stereotypical hallmark of Latin American literature for scholars and publishers in the West. The work of Fuguet and others was excluded from publication in the U.S. because it lacked magical realism and their texts “bien pudieron ser escritos en cualquier pais del Primer Mundo” (1996: 10, my translation: “could just as well have been written in any first-world country”). In an anecdotic style they testify how they tried to find fellow Latin American authors who also wanted to publish their non-magical realist work:
9 Macondo was the name of a fictional village in which the story of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de
soledad (1967) takes place. This novel is one of the most famous publications of the Latin American ‘Boom’,
which represents an editorial phenomenon rather than a literary generation. During the 1950s and 1960s Latin American authors, among whom many wrote fantastic and magical realist works that tended to describe Latin American identity, were published worldwide. In that sense, the ‘Boom’ was a Western phenomenon, and the magical fictions were perceived as typically Latin American, as opposed to the rational West. Cien años de
soledad was de magnum opus of García Márquez and also a high point in magical realist fiction. The name
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Llegamos a pensar que América Latina era un invento de los departamentos de español de las universidades norteamericanas. Salimos a conquistar McOndo y sólo descubrimos Macondo. Estábamos en serios problemas. Los árboles de la selva no nos dejaban ver la punta de los rascacielos. (Fuguet & Gómez 1996: 12)
We ended up thinking that Latin America was an invention of the Spanish departments of North American universities. We left to conquer McOndo, but we only discovered Macondo. We were in serious trouble. The trees of the jungle prevented us from seeing the tops of the skyscrapers. (Translation mine)10
The situation described by Fuguet and Gómez is strikingly similar to Said’s notion of Orientalism. With the objective to study and know Latin America and its literatures, Western universities have created an exotic stereotype of it (cf. Lousteau 2002). Moreover, the culture of the continent is to a certain extent constructed by the pen of the West, as this quote illustrates; for also on the Latin American market, mainly exotic literatures were published. McOndo contests the exoticist vision of Latino and Latin American culture: in Fuguet’s words, McOndo is “a certain way of looking at life, or, better yet, of understanding Latin America (make that America, for it is clear that the United States is getting more Latin American every day)” (2001: 69). The McOndo representation of Latin America and the U.S. acknowledges the mutual cultural influence between the U.S. and Latin America instead of polarizing them as two opposites. Thus McOndoists do not only criticize exotic stereotypes of Latin America, they also contest the cultural separation of North and South, which is just as well a result of stereotyping the regions.
Clearly, McOndo poetics is concerned with the question of Latin American and Latino identity, although they themselves tend to state that this theme in their literature has made way for merely personal issues (Fuguet & Gómez 1996: 13). Still, an important objective of their literatures is clearly to resist stereotypes of Latin American and Latino culture. Whether a novel or short story deals with personal issues or not, it still can have implications about cultural identity.11 The manifesto-like writings concerning McOndo imply a view on cultural identity that is more determined by difference than by sameness: “(…) life on this continent is far too complex to be so simply categorized. It is an injustice to reduce the essence of Latin America to men in ponchos and sombreros, gun-toting drug lords and sensual salsa-swinging señoritas” (Fuguet 1997). McOndo authors include, for example, (American) pop-culture, mass media and new technology as important determiners of the cultural
10 In principle, it would suit this thesis better to leave Spanish untranslated. However, due to the envisioned
reading public of this thesis, I am obliged to translate everything to English. Thus I do not want to suggest that one language is the norm; my choice is merely based on communicative reasons.
11 As is conventional in postcolonial studies, I conceive of ‘cultural identity’ as a discursive construct localized
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experience of their generation. Their work unites thus not only what was traditionally viewed as separated North American and Latin American culture, but also ‘high’ culture and pop culture. Some critics state, however, that this attitude in their literature simply results in assimilation towards North American culture instead of cultural hybridity, which is what the authors themselves want to see in their work. Rosa María Diez Cobo affirms that the principal characters in the McOndo narratives identify exclusively with cultural icons of North American descent (2009: 6). However, with respect to the novels discussed here, this argument is not convincing, as will become clear in my own analysis. The next section will explain the method of analysis in this research.
2.2. Towards a method: language and postcolonial narratology
In order to study cultural relations in Latino literature, I depart from the assumptions made in postcolonial studies. The most important of these assumptions are (1) the worldliness of the text and the power in cultural representations, (2) the constructed nature of cultural identity and (3) the agency of the colonized. Regarding the emphasis on the formal aspect in the novels under scrutiny, I will look at the relationship between language and identity. (Cultural) identity has always been a central concern in postcolonial literary studies, because in a postcolonial reading one focuses on the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’. The sense of self of an individual or a group is central to this relationship and it is one of the parameters of the cultural process. Néstor García Canclini points at the relationship between self and other as the object of study to understand culture: “Studying cultural processes, (…) rather than leading us to affirm self-sufficient identities, is useful for recognizing forms of positioning oneself in the midst of heterogeneity and for understanding how hybridizations are produced.” (2005: xxix) How then can language and narrative form be used to find position in this heterogeneity of cultural discourses? How do Latino authors mark their place and the place of the Latino minority in the cultural landscape of the U.S.? In the present research, I will investigate the role of language in this cultural process in the novels Yo-Yo Boing! and Norte.
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branch in this area was not too long ago termed ‘postcolonial narratology’, a much discussed one among other so-called contextual narratologies.12
Contextual narratologies have been much debated in the past decade, as numerous surveys from that period illustrate. (Sommer 2007; Nünning 2009; Kindt 2009) Central to postcolonial, feminist or other contextual narratologies is the aim to unravel how (unspoken) attitudes and ideologies are implicit in narrative form. Throughout the years, narratology thus changed from a dry structuralist analysis of possible narrative forms – with the aim to answer the question “what constitutes a narrative?” – to a study of possible semantic functions or effects of such narrative forms. In other words, the interest in narratology moved from the isolated ‘text as text’ to the position of that text in its cultural context – its worldliness, indeed – which is constituted by other representations or ‘texts’ in the broad poststructuralist sense.13
The main problem with most of the surveys on contextual narratologies is that they present their ideas with an air of newness, whereas this newness is only relative: the emphasis in the objectives of research has shifted, but the field has not transformed completely. The surveys reflect on the main assumptions made in their fields and argue for a method informed by narratology. A postcolonial approach to literature, for example, normally does not imply a strict methodology and is characterized by hermeneutic analysis. Arguments for a postcolonial narratology then may be motivated by the wish for more methodological accuracy. In regard to this, feminist narratology and its great influence in the 1980s are often mentioned as an important and successful example of contextual narratology: not only did feminists implement the narratological toolbox to interpret texts; they also showed how issues of power and gender are implied in narrative form and thus how narrative form can be interpreted semantically.
Important in such an approach is the acknowledgement that the interpreter him/herself is also ‘localized’: the interpretation is to a great extent dependent on the culture and ideology of the interpreter and the reading strategy he/she employs. It is not the pretension of cultural narratologists to add objectivity to their interpretation with the terminology of narratology. Narratology was in fact never objective; as Herman and Vervaeck show in their discussion of narrative categories, structuralists did not even agree on many categorizations, which demonstrates that the analysis of a text’s ‘deeper’ structure is a cognitive, interpretive act that may depend on the reading strategy of the interpreter. It does no harm to emphasize here that my own analysis is in this sense also hermeneutical and I do not pretend to give objective answers about the texts or about semantic functions of narrative forms.
Thus, in a postcolonial narratological analysis, one would focus on the typical postcolonial issues like power, stereotype, roots, routes, dislocation, hybridity or language in relation to relevant
12 Here I use Roy Sommer’s terminology (2012). Roy Sommer sets out a diagram of today’s types of
narratology, under the overarching term postclassical narratology. He divides the field in formal narratologies and contextual narratologies (153).
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narratological categories. The most useful categories in such an analysis, which were also widely analyzed in feminist narratology, are anthropomorphous categories like focalization and narration (including the type of narrator and speech representation), which possibly manifest a hierarchical subject-object relationship. By focusing on speech representation, for example, the intervention of the narrator in the character’s utterances can be ‘measured’ through the distinctions between free indirect speech, direct speech, free direct speech, etc. (Herman & Vervaeck 2005: 95-98). Such anthropomorphous categories will be the most relevant in my research. In the analysis of the novels, I will link them to notions of hierarchy, dominance and stereotype, because it is through narration, focalization and speech representation that subject-object relationships are established in narrative. It is important to focus on this, because, as I explained in the preceding section, the subordinate object runs the risk of being fixed in a stereotype.
This strategy will be coupled with an analysis of linguistic and stylistic devices. Marion Gymnich (2002) advocates the analysis of linguistic elements in postcolonial narratology, “since categories like ethnicity and class as well as concepts of identity and alterity are to a considerable extent constructed via language” (63). To merely recognize a plurality of languages or styles in a narrative is not enough to understand the functionality of such a stylistic device, as she states: “The distribution of such elements, i.e. the question of the position of non-standard speakers within the hierarchy of the narrative text, turns out to be even more important” (ibid.). Gymnich especially points out the significance of (types of) language(s) used by narrators and characters, indicating that the narrator generally has the highest degree of authority in the narrative. However, she only distinguishes between a homo- and heterodiegetic narrator to explain the degree of authority they can obtain, whereas there are much more properties a narrator can have and which matter in its relation with the characters. An unreliable narrator, for example, would not even have authority at all. The type of narrator determines its position vis-à-vis the story world and its characters; there can exist a great distance between these instances, or there can be a high degree of empathy. Gymnich illustrates this by describing six possible ‘linguistic relations’ between narrator and characters, indicating their possible implications. It is necessary to indicate, however, that also other narratological axes could be significant in this relationship. As signaled above, speech representation shows in what degree the narrator is present and how he represents the words of the character, which can also imply a hierarchy. Also, a focus on focalization or literary point of view (‘who perceives the events?’) on the level of narrative is relevant in levels of alterity with respect to language.
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issues of language predominantly in the context of Anglophone literatures, describes various ways in which a foreign language, a creole, pidgin or a dialect can appear in the text. I summarize them here in four ways, which also can be combined in a literary text (137-47):
1. It can be described in an indirect way (“… he said in Spanish.”) 2. It can be demonstrated incidentally through ‘lexical borrowing’:
a. Accompanied by a translation, explanation or a glossary at the end of the book.14 b. Without translation, explanation or glossary
3. It can be demonstrated by means of ‘code-switching’: “(…) a whole clause or a sizeable phrase from the other language or dialect is imported.” (142-3) This can occur incidentally or constantly.15
4. Languages or dialects could appear side by side with equal weight.16
Different reasons can underlie these different uses of foreign elements. According to Talib, such language choices depend on factors like communication, economics, politics or poetics. The inclusion of an untranslated foreign element is generally regarded as a political act, given the fact that a translation would give higher status to the ‘receptor culture’ (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 65). Besides, as Marion Gymnich indicates, explaining or translating a linguistic element “marks the alterity of the culture that is presented in the story” (Gymnich 2002: 68). But language variance can also appear in literary texts to invoke social realism, i.e. the author’s wish to stay as close as possible to the reality represented. As Talib indicates, this often goes hand in hand with the representation of cultural tensions or conflict (Talib 2002: 146). Ashcroft et al. also indicate that a variety of languages in literature from the postcolony can be read as a metonymy for cultural difference and/or tensions in the postcolonial context. While interpreting a text, the postcolonial critic has to make sure, however, not to assume that culture is inherent in language (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 50-52). However, it is still a possibility that the text itself represents a language as the container of a culture. For example, as Lourdes Torres indicates, in Puerto Rico the Spanish language is generally regarded as an extremely important symbol of the nation and cultural identity (2007: 88).
The ideas about language as presented in The Empire Writes Back that I mentioned above are merely based on examples of foreign elements in Anglophone literatures. Also Talib’s corpus consists almost entirely of works from former colonies of Great Britain. The historical context of language choice in Latino literature of the U.S. is of course quite different, because, among other things, Spanish is a language with a long written history. On the other hand, Spanish has no official status in the U.S. and in that sense it has a subordinate status, just like the foreign languages Talib and Ashcroft consider in the former British colonies. As Laura Lousteau’s synthesis of language choices in Latino
14
See for example Junot Diaz’s Drown (1997): the colloquial Spanish words are translated in the glossary at the end of the story collection.
15 Examples can be found in the novels under discussion in this thesis, but also in Alberto Fuguet’s Missing
(2010).
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literature shows, the reasons for certain choices are also similar to those Talib mentions (see above). But these reasons can vary among authors, and Lousteau shows that they do (2002: 45-53). After all, these choices depend on the specific context of the text and the author. This suggests that it is impossible to make general statements about every kind of salient linguistic aspect in Latino literature, but Lourdes Torres confirms that the inclusion of untranslated elements is also in this context regarded as a political act (when the meaning of those elements is not obvious in the context). In the analysis of the corpus in this research, I will come back to the specifics of language choice of Giannina Braschi and Edmundo Paz Soldán. Regarding the ideological background of McOndo and Latino minorities in general, it is to be expected that language choices in the representation of identity for these authors are also politically motivated.
Narratives in which the focus lies mainly on the sujet or the way of telling (rather than the story itself) put extra emphasis on representation and language as themes; they turn their form into part of the content and obtain a self-reflexive or metalinguistic and/or metafictional property. In my analysis of Norte and Yo-Yo Boing!, this postmodernist17 aspect of the texts is very important: it is precisely the focus on language and representation in culture which reveals the constructed nature of narratives in the broad sense, i.e. literary narratives but also narratives of cultural identity which are often stereotypical. The hypothesis of this study is then, that through the use of language and narrative form as an instrument and as a theme, McOndo authors blur and deconstruct the cultural boundaries between North and South in the Americas and in that way are able to ‘give a voice’ to the Latino subaltern in U.S. society, who cannot fit in one of the stereotypical poles of North and South.
To summarize my method of analysis, I will investigate how language relates to identity in Norte and Yo-Yo Boing! I will start with the ‘reconstruction’ of the fabula (story), in order to highlight its minor relevance in comparison with the sujet (narrative and narration). Then I will analyze the sujet profoundly in accordance with the guidelines set out in this chapter, in order to explain the functions of narrative form and language in the text. With this method, I will show how the themes of language, representation and stereotype are addressed in the novels through their metalinguistic and metafictional properties. Also, I will explain how these specific formal and linguistic choices contribute to the representation of Latino identity. I will analyze narrative discourse and languages used in the light of the aspects discussed above, like distance, hierarchy and otherness, all of which relate directly to the concept of stereotype. It is therefore necessary to constantly focus on questions like “who is speaking?” and “who is perceiving/focalizing?”. My analysis will then uncover the fact that experimental postmodern play with form and language obtains political meaning in the context of the subaltern Latino population.
17 ‘Postmodern’ is a broad and vague term, but this is what I mean with it (in a literary narrative): a high
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3.
L
ANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN N
ORTE
(2011)
The title of the novel to be discussed in this chapter seems to express nothing more than a geographical region. However, with respect to the U.S. this word ‘North’ is heavily charged for Latin Americans. As innumerable immigrant narratives from the tradition have exemplified, since the start of the twentieth century the North has been full of promises and dreams for many Latin Americans; the North as a myth and promise of success draws hopeful people towards itself. The novel Norte, in accordance with this connotation, represents the U.S. as a magnet that attracts more and more immigrants from Latin America, and as a transforming nation as a result of this flood of people.
In this sense, Norte deviates clearly from the main tradition in Latino/Hispanic immigrant literature. As I mentioned in the Introduction, Nicolás Kanellos (2011) describes the main features of this tradition in terms of nostalgia for the homeland, and rejection and moral criticism of the ‘giant of the North’. In Norte, the North/South dualism is less clear; North and South are not represented in such an antithesis. Given the fact that the theme of language and the use of language in this novel are quite salient, in this chapter I will discuss how these aspects of the text relate to (cultural) identity. In other words, I will analyze the formal elaboration on the themes of language, representation and stereotype in the story and I will discuss how the text itself is ‘positioned’ in the cultural landscape through its specific formal and linguistic choices. I will argue in this chapter that Norte does not propose or describe a single or stable cultural identity of the Latino population but rather shows the variety and change of that same group. Through the metafictional emphasis on cultural representation and the particular use of language in the novel, stereotypes are deconstructed in Norte.
Edmundo Paz Soldán (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1967) moved to the United States in 1988, to study Political Science. After obtaining his BA, he studied Latin American literatures. Today, he is a professor in Latin American literatures at the Cornell University (Ithaca), as well as a productive fiction writer. He also writes regularly for various Latin American, American and Spanish newspapers and periodicals.18 Since his debut in 1990 with the story collection Las máscaras de la nada, Paz Soldán has published nine novels and various story collections. He also participated in the aforementioned anthology McOndo (1996) and together with Alberto Fuguet he was editor of the collection Se Habla Español: Voces Latinas en USA (2000). These activities show that Paz Soldán is a central figure in the McOndo generation, although later he has also said to prefer a more nuanced stance than the one presented in the polemic prologue of the 1996 anthology. “We were young and naïve and maybe that is why our response to the exoticization of Latin America through the immense
18 Edmundo Paz Soldán regularly publishes articles in papers and periodicals like Time, El País, La Tercera
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popularity of magical realism was so visceral,” he explains in an interview (Milian Arias 2005: 141). Paz Soldán is very conscious of the risk of contesting a stereotype, which is that one might just be replacing it with a new one. In his latest novel, Norte, the stances of the McOndo generation as described in Chapter 2 are still present, but my analysis will show that the elaboration is more nuanced.
An interesting fact with respect to the stances of McOndo towards the U.S. academia, among other things, is that Paz Soldán himself is a frequent author of academic articles. Literary writing and academic writing are not conflicting activities, however; they are of a complementary nature for him. Academic research inspires fiction writing and writing fiction can also raise questions that induce academic research (Navarra-Albaladejo 2006: 234). Paz Soldán’s admiration for the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) is not only perceivable in his fictional writing, but also in his work as a professor: with Gustavo Faverón Patriau he coedited the critical essay collection Bolaño Salvaje (2008). Also, the academic world has more than once played an important role in his fiction. Although Paz Soldán is himself an academic, he is not afraid to be critical of certain forms of academic thinking. As I explained in Chapter 2, McOndo affiliates are opposed to academic discourse that constructs a stereotype of Latin American literature. Again, Norte is to a greater extent nuanced with regard to this kind of criticism, but the theme still has an important role in this novel.
Paz Soldán’s work is characterized by a subtle social and political engagement. His first publications are concerned with the social and political situation of Bolivia, which he discusses critically from a distance. In an interview he noted that he was interested in the role of language in power formations (Plaza 2008). His latest publications reveal the fascination for his present-day country of residence. Power and violence are of continual interest in his oeuvre, as the novel Norte also shows. Possibly, this is a result of his admiration for Latin American authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Roberto Bolaño,19 but also for the North American William Faulkner. As will become clear in my analysis, Norte is not explicitly political but does have implications with regard to language and the representation of identities, which in the context of cultural minorities in the U.S. obtain some political significance.
As I will show, the sujet of this novel is extremely important for its significance. The particular way of telling and the use of language have a postmodern, reflective function with regard to cultural representations, including fiction, and language. This metafictional and metalinguistic property of the text has a specific political function in the context of the Latino immigrant in the U.S. – to contest language and narratives about the immigrant that circulate in society’s system of representation. To demonstrate the importance and the semantic functions of narrative and linguistic strategies in Norte, I will first summarize the fabula.
19
22
Martín (Ramírez) leaves his family in Mexico in the 1920s to work and earn some money in the U.S., especially on the railroads and in the mines. During the Revolución Cristera in Mexico (1926-1929) he receives a letter from his brother, which he misunderstands, so that he thinks that his wife has joined the federal troops. Martín loses his job and wandering the street in a confused state and unwilling to speak, he is detained by the police and eventually interned in a psychiatric hospital. In the hospital he passes most of his time drawing to communicate, but also for his enjoyment. He draws images from his memories about rural life in Mexico, and includes images from advertisements he finds in American periodicals. His drawings are discovered by a professor specialized in the art of the mentally ill. The professor visits him regularly, takes Martín’s drawings and becomes very successful with them, ultimately leaving for Europe, while Martín gets sicker and dies in the hospital in 1963.
Jesús grows up in the eighties, in a criminal and dangerous environment in Villa Ahumada, a Mexican village close to the U.S. border.20 His father leaves for the North and Jesús falls in love with his sister, who turns him down repeatedly. Jesús, still a young adolescent, leaves the village after having raped and killed a prostitute. He starts to work as a mechanic in Juárez and he is asked by his boss to cross the border illegally in order to rob and smuggle cars from the U.S. to Mexico. After accepting this proposal, Jesús more often than not roams the U.S. by freight train or by stolen car. He obtains the habit to jump off the train and enter houses, to rob and kill American women and women that appear assimilated. After having spent years in prison he gets psychotic and continues his crimes. Within years he is the most wanted serial killer in the U.S. and becomes known as the Railroad Killer. One of the policemen involved in his case is Ranger Rafael Fernández. In the end Jesús turns himself in, because his sister asks him to, and he is put on death row.
Michelle, whose life is situated in the first decade of the twenty-first century, grows up in Bolivia and emigrates to the U.S. with her parents. Michelle lives in Landslide and leaves graduate school because she dislikes the critical academic approach to literary texts. She works at Taco Hut and in her free hours she is occupied with developing a story for a graphic novel she wants to make. At the same time, she resumes the relationship with her former professor Fabián – also an immigrant – who has got stuck in his research on Latin American literature and searches for comfort in drugs and alcohol. Michelle gets pregnant and Fabián presses her to get an abortion. On an exposition of Martín Ramírez’s drawings, Michelle realizes she and Fabián cannot be together. After having heard the story about the Railroad Killer she is suddenly able to fully develop her story.
Having summarized the fabula, in the next section I will show how focalization and narration in Norte contribute to the thematic of language and stereotype. In the subsequent section I will analyze the linguistic strategies employed in the novel to affirm the presence of the Latino minority on U.S. ground and to affirm the variety of that same minority. All these narrative and linguistics strategies in
20 Martín and Jesús are based on the real Martín Ramírez and Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, as Paz Soldán himself
23
Norte are employed to give a voice to the Latino community. Moreover, the metafictional and metalinguistic impulse of the novel eventually leads to the deconstruction of stereotypes of Latin America and Latino immigrants in the U.S.
3.1. Voices and stereotypes in Norte
Norte can be described as a gallery of Latino immigrant experiences. The Latin American immigrants are portrayed in three main story lines, set in three different time periods of the twentieth and the twenty-first century. The stories are related to each other like the tiles of a mosaic: they are separated, but in their juxtaposition they also form a whole. Although the characters of the three stories are separated in time and space, there are also thematic elements in the narrative that unite them, such as the immigrant status itself, insanity, power struggles and violence. Also, language in one way or another plays a significant role in each of the characters’ stories.
The structure of the storylines in Norte invites the reader to look for similarities and for points of suture between the various immigrants and their stories, because they are not told completely separately, but their chapters intertwine. The stories therefore run parallel in the reading process although they are set in different time periods. It seems as if this structure is an attempt to cancel historical differences, but as I will show ahead, other stylistic elements expressly mark different historical periods. Also, the three stories are completely different and told by different narrators; this novel is clearly not written to give an account of the Latino immigrant in the U.S. It rather offers the bigger picture, the variety and even the good and the bad within the immigrant population, as I will also show.
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novels like Cien años de soledad tend to narrate the collective in a reductive way, from a single, dominant perspective.21
The case of Norte is quite the contrary of this example. The multiple focalization in this novel gives voice to the immigrants themselves and portrays a diverse image of immigrants in the U.S. The three storylines are often focalized by the main characters themselves or in some cases by secondary characters (Ranger Fernández in the storyline of Jesús, the professor in the storyline of Martín). Through internal focalization and free direct speech,22 the characters get a voice and their experiences and attitudes are foregrounded. In the case of Jesús, the serial killer, this can have a disturbing effect: “Renata no había estado mal; con ella había logrado contenerse. No la había matado pese a todas sus ganas. Algo especial debía tener para amansarlo así.” (219, “Renata wasn’t so bad; with her, he managed to control himself. He hadn’t killed her despite his wish to do so. She must have had something special, turning him soft like that.”)23 In the storyline about Michelle, the narrator is the most visible, because she herself is the extradiegetic narrator of her own story. The focalization switches between internal and external focalization. External focalization is clear in evaluative sentences like this one: “Me hubiera gustado tenerle piedad pero creo que yo también estaba cansada.” (212, “I would have liked to feel sorry for him but I think I was also done.”) In Michelle’s narration, thus, the narrator is quite visible, but still personal. In the chapters where the storylines of Martín and Jesús are told, the narrator’s voice is neutral (not evaluative) and leaves space for a lot of internal focalization and dialogues. All characters in Norte are thus represented as subjects (not objects) and the narrator’s voice does not intervene in their language. As a result, Norte is a novel that does not present a univocal message or a closed, wound up narrative that runs the risk of stereotyping people. Rather the multiplicity of voices in the text shows the diversity of the population.
Taking into account that Norte contains numerous overt and covert references to the oeuvre of Roberto Bolaño, the fact that this novel is divided in five sections could provide an intertextual link with 2666 (2004). This novel equally consists of five sections, each of which offers a different perspective on the violent happenings in the (fictional) city Santa Teresa. In Norte, however, each immigrant voice is not neatly set apart in a section, but the structure is more chaotic, the chapters intertwine throughout the whole novel. It seems as if Paz Soldán employs strategies to put the reader off track constantly.
21 Of course, this short account of Cien años de soledad does no right to the versatile work and an appropriate
interpretation of the novel would be much more nuanced. However, the point here is to highlight the attitude of some contemporary Latin American and Latino authors towards this work and the difference between the narrative discourse of García Márquez (and his adherents) and the narrative discourse of Paz Soldán and many of his contemporaries (like Giannina Braschi, as will be demonstrated in the next chapter).
22
‘Free direct speech’ does not refer to speech exclusively but also to consciousness. (v. Herman & Vervaeck 2005: 95)
23 All translations from Norte are my own. In quotes with code-switching, my translation appears between
25
The portrayal of the immigrant population by Paz Soldán is multifaceted and therefore not overly politically correct: in Norte, also the bad side of the immigrant population is given a voice. This voice is especially perceivable in the psychopathic Jesús.24 Some reviews and fellow authors have complained about the appearance of this character, because it would be politically incorrect to represent the immigrant as a serial killer. However, the serial killer is not portrayed in isolation. The perspective of especially Ranger Fernández reveals the process of the construction of stereotypes. The chapters in which Fernández focalizes are situated in the 1990s, a period in which the use of the terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ in the pejorative sense increased a lot. (As I explained in Chapter 2, those terms were bound to negative stereotypes). Fernández witnesses how the case of the Railroad Killer provokes stereotyping in the media and popular imagery. To his annoyance, the news reporter Dawn Haze expresses the fear that circulated in the U.S. imagery at the time:
Dawn Haze estaba furiosa: con leyes tan laxas de inmigración, pronto el país no sólo estaría invadido por todos los mexicanos, sino que se contagiaría de la violencia desalmada que flotaba por allá. It’s time to build a wall so they can’t come here so easily! (Paz Soldán 2011: 168)
Dawn Haze was furious: with such flexible immigration laws, the country would not only soon be invaded by all Mexicans, it would also be infected with the crude violence from there. It’s time to build a wall so they can’t come here so easily!
This quote illustrates how focalization switches constantly in Norte: here, the discourse of the news reporter is represented via free indirect discourse. Thus, the complete picture of competing discourses in society is offered directly. The portrayal of Jesús is, through this strategy, complemented by the exposition of the hysteria and stereotyping one incident is able to provoke in society. Fernández sees how the story about the Railroad Killer becomes very dominant in popular imagery and how it triggers certain stereotypes. He realizes that successful stories of immigrants like him are not recognized; only the stories that induce fear are present in the popular imagery: “Su proprio trabajo y el de tantos otros resultaba ensombrecido porque los medios y la gente se acordaban sólo del asesino illegal.” (169, “His own work and the work of so many others was overshadowed by the illegal serial killer, the only one remembered by the media and the people.”)
Moreover, it is clear that Jesús’s psychopathy, although it results in his wish to kill white women, is in no way related to his Mexican nationality or his status as an immigrant. It is suggested that his condition might be caused by a fall on the head when he was a child (276), and that in his younger years he already had violent fantasies and decapitated his sister’s doll (194). As Fernández concludes in a letter to Jesús at the end of the novel, some things – like extreme violence – are inexplicable:25 “(…) he llegado a la conclusion que también hay más que razones y que la vida tiene
24 This storyline covers most pages in the novel and can therefore be regarded as the central story. 25
